


Better than Freedom

by PetrichorPerfume



Series: Rainbow Marbles [45]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Broken Castiel, Demon Dean Winchester, Extreme Sensory Deprivation, Insanity, Loss of Faith, M/M, Prayer, Punishment, Sensory Deprivation, major character deaths mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-05
Updated: 2014-07-05
Packaged: 2018-02-07 14:26:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1902429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PetrichorPerfume/pseuds/PetrichorPerfume
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean made a mistake. Sam wonders if it’s the last mistake he’ll ever make with Cas. If maybe this is the time he went too far for good. It’s only a matter of time, after all. Maybe this is the time Dean pushed and Cas fell too far and too hard and too fast for either of them to catch him. Maybe this is the time Cas shatters.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Better than Freedom

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Extremely dangerous, unsafe, and unethical punishments, and murderous and suicidal threats, plus mentions of past major character deaths.
> 
> The device described is a sensory deprivation tank. It generally produces effects ranging from extreme calm and relaxation to hallucinations and out of body experiences. People pay to spend an hour or two in these devices, but they *know* what's happening, which is not the case in this story.

He’s trapped. Trapped inside a room, inside his body, inside his mind.

 

The room is shaking – no, that’s him, or maybe it’s the air. He tries to reach out, to find a wall, or the floor, maybe, but all he feels is nothingness. He brings a trembling hand up to what he thinks is his face. Wet. His hand is wet. Is he bleeding? He breathes in. There’s no scent. No _Sam; linen_ or _Dean; musk_ or the floral scents he normally uses to bathe or to moisturize or to spread across his lips.

 

His fingers crawl down and slip into his mouth. For a while, it helps. The fingers – two, maybe three, though it feels like six; does he have six fingers? – are salty, and his mouth is warm. Then the fingers go numb and his mouth cools until it’s the same temperature as the rest of wherever he is.

 

He can’t hear anything, not his heartbeat or his breathing or the soft clanking in the walls from the ventilation system. He presses one hand, maybe three, onto his chest. He can’t feel anything. He’s dead. He doesn’t remember dying, though.

 

All he can remember is Dean. Dean, screaming at him. Dean, blindfolding him and shackling him and taking him to a room deep inside the bunker. Dean, ripping off the shackles and throwing him in here. At first it had been wet. Now it’s nothing. Maybe he drowned.

 

No, he’s still breathing. Maybe he’s drowning now. He breathes in. The air feels wet. Maybe it’s not air. Maybe it’s water. He’s dying.

 

It doesn’t feel like the other times. The first time, Raphael had ripped him to shreds. It had hurt. The next time, he’d seen Lucifer snap and then he’d woken up in a forest in Germany in an empty vessel. The time after that, he’d felt the Leviathan take over his body. He thinks that he drowned that time, too, but it felt different. And the last time he’d died, he’d been stabbed and it had been painful.

 

But this time, it’s not painful. It’s not painless either, though. There’s a part of him that hurts, but he can’t tell which part. He thinks for a moment and then he realizes that he can’t feel where his body is. He can’t feel anything at all. Maybe he doesn’t have a body anymore. He’s not sure.

 

_Please don’t bring me back this time,_ he prays. He wants to see Dean again, but he’s pretty sure the demon will be disappointed in him for dying. He’ll be punished. Then he remembers that he’s being punished right now. Dean is punishing him by killing him. He knows that he was bad, but he hadn’t thought that he’d been so bad that the demon wouldn’t want him around anymore.

 

He’s bad. He’s horrible. He’s disobedient and useless and unlovable and Dean didn’t want him anymore so he’d thrown him away and left him to drown. He’d tried to be good, he really had, but Dean made it so _hard_ sometimes – no, he can’t think like that. This is _his_ fault. If he’d been better, Dean would have kept him. He was bad. He deserves to die.

 

His thoughts start to sprawl away from him. He tries to reach out and grasp them, to draw them back in, but he can’t quite manage it. Everything comes in little fragments of words and emotion. _Hopeless._ \- _Helpless._ \- _Unwanted._ \- _Unloved._

 

After a while, the only thought he can hold onto is that Dean never loved him and never will. No one will ever love him. He’s unlovable.

 

Why would an all-powerful, almighty being like _Dean_ love him anyway? Dean is to be worshiped. He is to be awed. Everything he does should be – should have been – in an effort to please Dean. Instead, he took for himself when Dean did not wish him to have.

 

He tries to cry, but he’s not sure where his body is or even if he has a body. All he knows is that he’s terrified. He needs Dean. Dean is the only one who can help him, the only one who can save him, the only one that can offer him redemption.

 

He starts hearing things. Howling things, in the darkness. Just out of sight, just out of reach. He tries to move away, but he’s trapped. He can’t move. He starts to panic. The things in the dark will kill him again. He sees their glowing red eyes and their rotted teeth and tries to shrink into himself.

 

The red-teeth howling things fade away. Laughter takes their place, great big shining white teeth laughing at him. Mocking him. The laughter is replaced by spinning wheels that make his head ache.

 

He hurts all over. He needs Dean. Dean can save him, but Dean won’t, because Dean doesn’t care about him anymore, because he’s useless and disobedient and Dean threw him out because he made one too many mistakes.

 

He tries to remember something nice. Dean, smiling. Sam, laughing. A warm bed. Sweet cake. A stuffed toy. _Love._

 

Then light floods into his world, and sound – the loud thump-thump-thump of his heartbeat and of Dean’s and the clank-clank of the vents and the _hiss_ of breath and the static sound of the silence in between. It’s cold, freezing cold, and every breath burns his lungs and he can _feel,_ warm, wet water and cold, hard air and _hands_ lifting him up and away. He starts to scream.

 

***

 

It’s awful. It’s completely and utterly _terrible._ It’s too horrible for words.

 

Sam is standing in the doorway, because Dean won’t let him get any closer.

 

Cas has been screaming for the past four hours. Well, he screamed for the first two, then he started coughing up blood and wheezing and for the past two hours his mouth has been open wide in a silent, bloody, _horrible_ scream.

 

Dean made a mistake. Sam wonders if it’s the _last_ mistake he’ll ever make with Cas. If maybe this is the time he went too far for good. It’s only a matter of time, after all. Maybe this is the time Dean pushed and Cas fell too far and too hard and too fast for either of them to catch him. Maybe this is the time Cas shatters.

 

He knows it’s selfish, but all he can think about is himself. How Dean will treat him once Cas is too broken to play with. How he’ll deal with sleeping alone every night. How he’ll manage to cope with being the only one Dean has to vent his anger on. How he’ll handle losing Cas.

 

_A year,_ he thinks. _Another year, alone, and I’ll be on that bed screaming_ that _scream._

 

Then Dean gives up. His stomach drops as Dean fixes him with a helpless stare. He snaps, and the next thing he knows, Dean is pressed up against the wall.

 

“You _fix_ this, Dean,” he orders. “You always do,” he continues, desperation creeping into his voice.

 

Dean shakes his head. “Sammy...”

 

“You fix this,” he repeats. “Fix it, or I swear to God I’ll kill us both and then where will you be? Huh, Dean? Keeping us like this, torturing us, just so we won’t leave? That’s it, isn’t it? That’s why you’re doing this? ‘Cause you know we’d leave your sorry ass if we had _half_ a chance?”

 

Dean sighs. “Go ahead. It’d be easier to fix him in Hell, anyway.”

 

Sam picks Dean up and slams him against the wall harder. “You’re sure about that, huh? You think we’d go to Hell and be your puppets for the rest of eternity, don’t you?” He laughs and backs away. “That’s cute, Dean. Really.” He shakes his head. “Fix this,” he says. “Or else.” He retreats back to the safety of the doorway.

 

“You think an _angel_ is going to bring you to Heaven, Sammy? That’s adorable. Really, it is. There aren’t any _strong_ enough.”

 

“You’re sure about that, Dean?”

 

“The archangels are _dead,_ Sam. _Dead._ ”

 

“You really want to take that chance?”

 

Dean looks away, and Sam knows that he’s won. “I can’t make him forget, this time,” Dean says.

 

“This time?” Sam asks. He’s been suspicious for a while that Dean has been hiding something from them, and this just confirms it. He crosses his arms and huffs out a broken puff of laughter. “How many times, Dean?”

 

“A few.”

 

“Five? Six?”

 

“Forty-seven, but you won’t remember in a second.”

 

Sam blinks. “Remember what?”

 

_Forty-eight._ He sits down on the bed and sighs. “Most of the things I’d ordinarily do would just make him worse. Unless...” He holds out his hand over Castiel’s face, illuminating it in a pale red light.

 

He’ll learn later that Dean went into Castiel’s mind, that the five minutes he spent anxiously watching them felt more like five _days_ inside Castiel’s shattered self.

 

Cas sits up and gasps like he hasn’t breathed in years. Dean stands and gets as far as Sam’s doorway before Sam stops him with a hand on his arm.

 

“You’re not leaving,” he says.

 

“Stop me,” Dean bites back. Sam isn’t sure if it’s a challenge or a request. He lets the demon go.

 

Sam turns to Cas and wonders where to start picking up the broken pieces of him this time.

 

***

 

Sam considers praying, after Cas is back to his functionally broken self. He even gets down on his knees in the bathroom one morning before he stops himself. He can’t, not when there’s even a shadow of a doubt in his mind that it won’t _work_ and he’ll be stuck here for the rest of his life and in Hell for the rest of eternity.

 

_Hope,_ he thinks. _Hope is better than freedom._

 

When he finally pulls himself off the floor, Cas is in the doorway. Sam can tell that he’s been there the entire time.

 

“Did you drop something?” Cas asks.

 

Sam reaches up to rub the back of his neck. _My faith,_ he wants to say. “The soap,” he lies. It’s a convenient cliché.

 

Cas smiles, and it’s so fake and so horrible that he just has to smile back.


End file.
